The Idea of Perfection

by Paul Valéry

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  Trying to save Perfection—in the shipwreck that is modern times, saving the idea of perfection—the idea of time, of work, being as beautiful as the work itself …

  — UNTITLED NOTEBOOK, 1937

  INTRODUCTION: PAUL VALÉRY, THE LIFE OF A MIND

  Poetry never interested me as a kind of nightingale’s instinct—but particularly as a problem and a pretext for difficulties—or as a well-defined construction [ … ] Nothing seems to me more common or more negligible than the poet reduced to a poet.

  UNTITLED NOTEBOOK, 1915

  In 1896, four years after he stopped writing poetry, Paul Valéry published the first of two remarkable texts that broke with the languorous romanticism of the Symbolists and other fin-de-siècle literary movements with which he had been associated. An Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci is a complex intellectual fantasy on structure, symmetry, composition, and the psychology of the creative mind. Published a year later, An Evening with Monsieur Teste is a portrait, evocative of the later works of Kafka and Borges, of a man who has reduced life to pure intellect and a Robinson Crusoe–like existence of mental self-sufficiency. From 1897 to 1917 Valéry published nothing more, and his early writings receded into a legend of artistic reserve, their author conflated with his character Teste: “I dreamed that the strongest minds, the wisest inventors, the most precise connoisseurs of thought, must have been unknown and selfish men who die without revealing themselves…”

  Then in April 1917, Valéry’s long poem La Jeune Parque, or The Young Fate, appeared as if out of nowhere in the window display of the publisher Gallimard. Classical rhymed couplets dissimulate an impressionist weave of abstract images: “My desire,” Valéry wrote in a letter, “has been to put, in flashes perhaps, in a nearly classical form and language, images that are entirely modern.” The poem stands with Eliot’s The Waste Land and Rilke’s Duino Elegies as a boundary stone where the old culture passes into the new. Three years later he published the Album de vers anciens (Album of Early Verse), and two years later, Charmes (Charms).

  A boundary stone can be seen as a beginning or an end; the formal perfection of Valéry’s mature poems was already an anachronism in an age that had tasted Apollinaire and Dada. The Young Fate and the two collections that followed established Valéry’s reputation as the last master of classical French verse, culmination of the Symbolists and a line of descent through Mallarmé back to Baudelaire, the final inheritor of Racine’s sonorous line and Victor Hugo’s lyric intensity. Very soon he was elevated to the rank of an eminently public figure, the icon of the poet. At the same time, he ceased in a sense to be a poet: after the second edition of Charms, from 1926, he published thousands of pages of writing but no new verse of any consequence.

  Valéry devoted the prolific last decades of his life to writing volumes of essays, introductions, public addresses, poetic dialogues, on every imaginable topic. He wrote effortless and brilliant pages on politics, culture, philosophy, aesthetics, architecture, art, and dance … and, of course, on literature and poetry. The neoclassicism of his formal masterpieces, the analytical lucidity of his essays, the extremes of reason and method of Monsieur Teste coalesced into the image of the supremely self-conscious poet. Valéry, T. S. Eliot famously wrote, “will remain for posterity the representative poet, the symbol of the poet, of the first half of the twentieth century—not Yeats, not Rilke, not anyone else.”

  The works that most contributed to this image were undoubtedly his collections of prose fragments. Beginning discreetly around 1919, then in earnest in the 1920s after all his important lyric poems had appeared and the energy that produced them seemed spent, he began publishing short books with titles such as Rhumbs, Poetry in the Rough, Little Studies, Instants, Lost Poetry, that were then collected into longer ones, Tel Quel, Mélanges … They seemed, at first reading, to be collections of prose poems in the tradition of Rimbaud, fragments of poetic vision, observations on the poetic process, aphorisms and remarks on language and thought, “thoughts and impressions,” as Valéry himself once called them with deceptive simplicity.

  In the prefaces of these little volumes, he expresses a deep reticence, reminiscent of Monsieur Teste, to publish what he presents as hastily prepared and arbitrarily ordered material. There is also a constant concern with being misunderstood by his readers. Exactly how they were being misunderstood only became clear decades later. Yet the clues were there, for instance in the preface to Analects (1926), where he writes: “For thirty years I have been keeping the journal of my experiments. No sooner risen from my bed, before the day, in the first dawn, between the lamp and the sun, a pure and profound hour, I have the custom of writing whatever follows from its own invention. The idea of another reader is entirely absent from these moments…”

  Others make books; I am making my mind.

  —ALGOL, 1902

  Behind the published works, behind the uneventful life of the almost forgotten and then exceedingly famous poet, there hides another story, a private life of the mind, that has its record in 28,000 pages of notebooks revealed in their entirety only after his death. Their existence had been hinted at, of course, evoked in rumors and literary asides; but once made public it took years for their significance to be fully appreciated. It turned out that the prose fragments published in Valéry’s lifetime were not what they had been taken to be: they were not after-the-fact musings of an accomplished poet, nor his occasional sketchbook, nor excerpts from his private journal. They were a disfigured glimpse of a vast and fragmentary “exercise of thought,” a restless intellectual quest as unguided and yet as persistent, as rigorous, and yet as uncontainable as the sea which is so often their subject. The poems themselves, mere “exercises of literature,” were the necessary accidents, the glance of sunlight on the multifaceted waves of that same swell. For a writer profoundly nourished on ideas of architecture and music, whose poems are marvels of form and space, his inevitable inability to find a form for this greatest of his works represents perhaps the essential contradiction of his life.

  To publish, one day, this investigation, it would be better to do it in the form: I did this and that. A novel if you prefer, or if you prefer a theory. The theory of oneself.

  — TABULAE MEAE TENTATIONUM, 1897 - 1899

  Reviewing a biography of the Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg in 1936, Valéry writes: “I saw emerging from chapter to chapter the extraordinary Novel of a ‘second’ life,—I say novel because during my reading I naively experienced that intense desire for sequence, that thirst for development, which normally seizes us only with those productions whose purpose is to evince the delights of adventure … for my particular tastes, there is no voyage to the frontiers of reality, no fantastic tale, no epic or dramatic narrative more powerful than the study of the inexhaustible creator and universal transformer that we call the Mind.”

  The notebooks were intende
d as an essentially analytic work. Yet reading their repetitions and contradictions, their claims and hesitations, their constant search for form and almost immediate negation of what form they find, is like reading such a “Novel of a second life.” Valéry’s first model was Descartes, for having told the story of his intellectual quest to reestablish his thought on first principles:

  The Discourse on the Method … is truly the modern novel … the philosophy that came after him rejected the autobiographical part. Yet that’s the part that should be retained; one must record the life of a theory as one records the life of a passion (sex) … (Letter to André Gide, 1894)

  The life of a theory. In Valéry’s case, the very human life of a quest for a nearly inhuman lucidity. The notebooks, unfolding through constant self-searching and self-definition, are at the same time the theory, the record of the theory’s life, and the record of the life of Paul Valéry himself.

  A generation “formed by the cult of the Beautiful.”

  — B, 1916

  A CHILDHOOD OF SYMBOLS

  Valéry’s letters, like Rilke’s, form a world and an oeuvre of their own. They crackle with the lively intelligence, the tender and playful sensibility, so often attested to by those who knew him. The magnum opus, and record of one of history’s great literary friendships, is the three-way correspondence between Valéry and his two friends Pierre Louÿs and André Gide. Valéry’s encounter with Louÿs, the irrepressible dandy, in 1890 was the determining moment in his life as a young writer. For Valéry came of age in the last decadent years of a period when European literature was turning on itself in a whirl of poetic schools and programs, motivated by a growing questioning of the shared assumptions of language and discourse. It was Louÿs who led him to the absolute eye of the storm, the circle of Mallarmé. It was with Louÿs’s friend Gide that he threaded out of the maze toward a new clarity.

  May 1890, Paul Ambroise Valéry is a law student at the University of Montpellier, his home since early adolescence. He is midway through his year of military service; he has published a few Symbolist poems; his mind is brimming with Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and the Decadent aesthetic initiated by Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À Rebours (Against the Grain); his breast is afire with thirst for beauty, the literary life, Paris.

  In a youthful 1889 essay, “On Literary Technique,” he had described “a new conception of the writer” that contains the seeds of his lifelong preoccupations with rational method, science, and a rejection of the romanticism latent in the Symbolism whose codes he still followed despite his protestations. The previous December he had defined himself in a letter to the editor Karl Boès:

  Here are a few more poems from a young man of the provinces, far from the great fires of Paris. I am ignorant of what wind is blowing up there, if the young men are Symbolists, analysts, or neo-Christians, and I haven’t sought to satisfy the program of any school. I am partisan of a short and concentrated poem, a brief evocation closed by a sonorous and full line. I cherish, in poetry as in prose, the ever-so-profound theories of Edgar Poe, I believe in the supremacy of rhythm and especially in the suggestive epithet. I prefer Mallarmé to Verlaine, and Joris-Karl to all the others. And when I write poems, I follow my own fantasy alone …

  The “unlikeliest of chances” comes one afternoon at the end of that May. Valéry is on leave from the army, attending a student banquet for the six hundredth anniversary of the University of Montpellier. On a café terrace he happens to be sitting next to a certain Pierre Louis (the “ÿ” came later). Of this encounter Louÿs wrote to his brother:

  I met by chance in Montpellier a little student who’d passed unnoticed throughout the festivities and whom I noticed only because of his eyes, eyes that speak like those of Gide. His name is Paul Valéry; he said the most astonishing things about The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and Huysmans, and Verlaine, and begged me to write to him, so sad he was at having no one to talk to …

  Three days later, when Louÿs was back in Paris, they wrote the first of their hundreds of letters; six months later, Louÿs presented him to Gide. Over the next two years, Louÿs and Gide coached, cajoled, guided their younger friend into the literary life. Years that were filled with fervent confessions and long walks in the moonlight; limited-edition literary reviews and sweeping professions of faith; a visit to Paris and meeting Mallarmé and Huysmans; mathematics and Wagner …

  Many of Valéry’s first poems—with titles such as “Elevation of the Moon,” “Mystic Flower,” “Suave Agony”—drip with the sensual neoreligious incense of the Decadents, and were wisely left uncollected. Others proved more enduring, the ones that take up threads from the poems of Victor Hugo, the giant of French Romanticism, from the formally perfect mythological sonnets of the Parnassian José-Maria de Heredia, from the languorous Symbolist reveries of Henri de Régnier—and from Stéphane Mallarmé, the greatest of his idols. In particular, the relatively early Mallarmé of “Hérodiade” and “Après-midi d’un faun” (“Afternoon of a Faun”), who under the guise of ornate and mannered language, has already started pushing syntax toward the breaking point, which he will achieve in his late, almost cryptic poems.

  Then he discovers the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, and then the hallucinatory prose poems of the Illuminations. “Increasingly I find that reading poetry bores me,” he writes to Gide at the beginning of 1892, “and even Poe no longer has the power to waken me … Only the supreme pages of the Illuminations, read at night at the iciest point of dreams, still shake me with their violent and sure arm.”

  Louÿs has begun insisting that he collect his poems into a first book. Yet there is a touch of neurotic obsession in Valéry’s personality. The poems he wants to write become ever more ambitiously composed in his mind. His dream of surpassing the perfection of these idols, and the fear he will never do so, has reached a fever pitch.

  In those days, two terrible angels, Noûs and Erôs, showed me the existence of a path of destruction and domination …

  — UNTITLED NOTEBOOK, 1938

  “I FEEL MYSELF OTHER THIS MORNING”

  We will never know what actually happened on the night of October 4, 1892, in the Salita de San Francesco in Genoa. There’s no mention of it in Valéry’s letters or notes from the time. Even the date would be uncertain to literary historians—Valéry’s memory is notoriously imprecise—except for a note in his brother’s journal mentioning a huge storm. What is certain is that later in life he condensed into the memory of that night an intellectual and sentimental crisis that had been brewing for over a year and whose climax set in motion the intellectual upheaval that would come to define his life’s work.

  “I thought I was going mad there, in 1892,” he recalled in a letter thirty years later. “One particular sleepless night,—white with lightning, that I passed sitting on my bed hoping to be struck. (It seems I wasn’t worthy.) Nothing but high frequency—in my head as well as in the sky. I was endeavoring to break down all my first ideas, or Idols; and to break with a self that was incapable of achieving what it wanted, and did not want what is was capable of…”

  The spark, we are told, came on the day of his departure for those weeks of vacation, when he crossed paths with a certain Madame de R. The previous year he had been hopelessly in love with her, writing hundreds of fervent and unsent letters, and it seems that chance encounter was enough to set off the conjoint pressure of both mind and sentiment that had been building in him. The question of sentiment is crucial. Typical of the time, Valéry at eighteen had known little more of love than what he had learned from the attentions of the prostitute “Louise” and her colleagues. He was unprepared to meet the prospect of real sentiment, the struggle of spirit and flesh; in an 1891 letter to Louÿs he dramatically poses his dilemma in terms of artistic purity and spiritual integrity. The tension between his desire for self-mastery and the destabilizing intensity of his emotions would be a constant preoccupation throughout his life. (Otherwise how can we square the image of the paragon of re
ason with the man who in 1921 crossed half of France on a night train in a jealous fever, clutching a knife in his pocket? His mother and his mother tongue, he often reminds us, were Italian; but we should not forget that his civil-servant father came from a family of Corsican arms traders.)

  “I feel myself OTHER this morning,” Valéry wrote in another reminiscence of the Night of Genoa. “This feeling cannot last.” To make the change permanent, he devoted 1893 to an “intellectual Robespierrism.” That year was his last in Montpellier, a year of impatient preparations for moving to Paris, where the next year he would join the circle of Mallarmé’s disciples at the famous Tuesday gatherings, and then the circle of his closest friends. “I befriended Mallarmé,” he recalled in 1912, “after having felt his extreme influence, and at the very moment when I was internally guillotining literature. I adored that extraordinary man at the same time as seeing his head as the only one—priceless!—that I had to cut off in order to decapitate all of Rome…” It was also a year of preparations for a new life, a life of the mind, fortified by reason and prose, science and mathematics, and Edgar Allan Poe.

  Excited by a couple of lines of Poe, and overexcited by what the experiments (for compared with previous poetry, that was really the term I had to use) of Mallarmé and Rimbaud seemed to mean, I set to considering Poetry as a general problem [ … ] I wanted to know what I was doing.

  — UNTITLED NOTEBOOK, 1944

  The name of Poe might come as a surprise. It shouldn’t. Edgar Poe, as he’s known to the French, was seized on by Baudelaire as a symbol of the total artist and the poète maudit (accursed poet), and from that point on, the American writer’s personality and oeuvre took on a life of their own on the Continent.